The Java Story

Abstract

Java is now well established as one of the world’s major programming languages, used in everything from desktop applications to web-hosted applications and enterprise systems, and embedded in devices such as mobile phones and Blu-ray players. Its virtual machine (a core feature of the Java runtime platform, which we will explore later) also supports a family of related languages including Scala, Groovy, and specialized versions of Ruby and Python. However, its beginnings were relatively humble and obscure, until it came to wider attention via the web in 1995. Within a year it had become “the next big thing” in software. Interest in the language was quite remarkable, considering that it only existed in beta test versions. In many ways it was a question of being the right product at the right time, its popularity riding on the explosion of interest in the Internet and World Wide Web in the mid-1990s.